


Step One

by FactorialRabbits



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blood, Child Abuse, Corpses, Gen, I am happy with less than any of this but there we are, I am not in a headspace to deal with anything but angst and horror this is a warning, Major Character Injury, Minor Character Death, Off-Screen Racism, Tragedy of Duscur (Fire Emblem), Unpleasant Imagery, Violence against minors, hand-waved applications of healing magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:41:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23774758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FactorialRabbits/pseuds/FactorialRabbits
Summary: Dimitri has to save someone. If he doesn't... He isn't really sure what he'll do.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Dedue Molinaro
Kudos: 9





	Step One

**Author's Note:**

> I am having a truly awful week, so please just take this thing I'm not exactly happy with that I also do not care enough about to finish. That... Likely makes it sound worse than it is. I'm told I'm a terrible judge of my own work, but aren't we all?  
> But I upload on Tuesdays and that's literally the only way I have of determining the passage of time in the current climate, so have a far too functional Dimitri for your enjoyment. As its the only thing not set aside for a special event I have close enough to finished and that I care little enough about to be able to edit when super-depression.
> 
> I hope you find some enjoyment from it.

It had been a long time since father had died. Still, all Dimitri could see was fire. The burning corpses around him, and those in the distance where screamed echoed anew.

He had not the strength to crawl out from beneath Glenn.. Glenn's corpse. It had to be a corpse; the Lance had pricked Dimitri himself, and small scratch drawing blood from his chest, so it must have gone all through Glenn; as his knight and friend had thrown himself between the weapons.

All he could hear was the crackling of the flame, and an odd mewling sound, and it took him a few moments to recognise it was himself, expressing the pain of the heat and fire and the wounds all over his small body.

The people could still be there, though! Somebody… He was alive, so somebody else might yet be.

He bit down hard upon his tongue, tasting blood as he did, and prayed nothing had heard.

It seemed the goddess was listening, for although there was the sound of running feet, they did not stop. Instead, Dimitri the small, bare and bleeding feet of what could only be a child of Duscur sprinting past his prison made of flesh.

“Stop right there!” came a more familiar voice - that of one of father’s guards, though not one who had come with them.

He turned his head as much as he could, squinting at the guard, trying to think of a way to draw him close.. He wanted his father, he wanted mother, he wanted… He wanted to go home.

Only one of those things could his father’s guards give him, any more, but it would be something none the less.

If only he could attract that attention; he tried to speak a little louder, to draw the attention to himself. This, of course, proved an impossible mission

“You killed the king!” the guard, alone, screamed at the child, a child who was tripping over the corpses of both his kin and Dimitri’s as he tried to flee. “Your death is the only recompense!”

This child… The child did not kill the king. Dimitri knew that. The image is burrowed into his brain, just as he was burrowed under Glenn’s frozen corpse.

He remembered armour, red and unrelenting, and covered from head to toe, not a child.

The child screams interrupted the memory, and he could hear the distinct sound of weapons being drawn. He remembered, remembered blood and fire and horror, and the impossibility of doing anything, of saving anyone.

He could not bare to be so helpless, he will not be so helpless again

Somehow, somehow, SOMEHOW, he had to-

Dimitri managed to stand, Glenn’s corpse tossed aside. He could barely manage it, even with the burst of strength, and certainly could not properly walk.

But he could throw himself between this innocent child and the soldier’s blades.

“Leave him alone!” he managed to scream, as he threw himself in the way - back to the weapons.

He screamed again when the swords meet his already burnt and blistered skin. Blades carved into his flesh, and the echoing horror of the soldiers realising just what he had done was lost to the pain.

The last thing he remembered seeing before darkness consumed him once more was the terrified eyes of the child of Duscur.

* * *

Dimitri awoke an uncertain amount of time later, to a roof over his head. It was a poor roof, but one none the less. He could hear fierce winds outside, and raised voices nearby. They were familiar but distorted, and he could not quite identify them.

He was in pain, ever so much pain, so much pain he could not even tell what hurt. Everything, maybe. It certainly felt like everything; it was so consuming that his brain seems to have slowed and blocked function to save itself.

It did not save him from the tears; mother, father, Glenn... The guards, the anger towards the Duscur people surely already boiling over...

Eventually, the door opened. He turned turn his head the fraction that he could, to see a fraught Duke Fraldarius enter the room. Dimitri raised his eyes to meet those of his father’s friend, though he could not find it in him to shift his body.

Rodrigue did not notice it immediately, busying himself with casting a healing spell that soothed the agony of pain, and bought both calm and clarity to his mind. It was not a spell Dimitri recognised, but then faith had never been his forte.

A moment after the spell, eye contract was made, and Rodrigue's face shifted in some fashion far too complicated for Dimtri's exhausted mind to understand.

“Dima?” the word was whispered out, confused as much as anything. “You are awake?”

Exhausted despite having surely slept so long, Dimitri tried to give his response in his blinking; words, he had found, were refusing to comply. When he received no further reply, he struggled again and again with his voice until he eventually managed to whisper, “Rodrigue?”

He was at his bedside a moment, his fingers brushing over the sheets as he tried to hide tears in his eyes, “I am here, Dima, it will be alright now – please do not cry. I am sorry you woke alone.”

Dimitri did not think that was the problem at all, but cannot find the words to say so. Of course nobody was here; mother and father were dead, and so was Glenn, and his friends should have been safely in Fhirdiad. In fact… Why was Rodrigue there at all? Surely he should have been with Felix, mourning his son? He… Would have rather seen Rodrigue than his uncle, but… He was worried about Felix.

Regardless, he tried to reach for the hand on the sheets; his arms refused to comply. Rodrigue reached out to take it anyway, cupping bandaged fingers between both of his palms

“What do you need?” the words would have been soothing, if he could not hear he anguish and panic in them. “Your highness, what do you need?”

“Where is the Duscur boy?” what he chose to ask for; he knew his parents were dead, so why ask after them? The news he would hear he already knew, and did not care to hear again. It would... Only hurt, to hear it again.

“The one found near you?” Rodrigue asked, frowning a little. The wrong question, Dimitri surmised, but he did not care; he needed to save someone, to make up for failing Glenn and his parents. If the boy had been captured and not yet executed... He could save the boy with his position of prince, prove that he was not useless, and maybe make up to the universe the fact he had failed his parents. A tiny fraction of an amount, but it was a start on repaying his failure. “He was arrested.”

“He helped me,” it was a lie, but only a slight one; the need to protect the innocent had given him the strength to escape the prison of being trapped beneath this same Lord’s son, and had it not he surely would have died there and then, surrounded by the bodies of his kin.

“I see,” Rodrigue’s hands still hovered, his eyes remained so sad. Too sad, if you were to ask Dimitri. “I will try to speak on his behalf.”

“I will take him,” Dimitri promised. “I will take responsibility for my request.”

His father’s friend went very quiet, before he sighed. “You have a good heart. Maybe too good.”

Later Dimitri would come to wonder just what Duke Fraldarius was doing, agreeing to the suggestion. Then, however, he did not think of it, purely satisfied with having helped.

“Thank you,” he turned his eyes to Rodrigue, hoping the truth of those words was clear enough. “If… If I can save someone…”

“Rest,” he whispered back. “I will make sure all is well, just… Just rest, Dima. I’ll bring Felix to see you soon… The boy too, if it will make you feel better. Just… Just rest, please.”

The order to rest was not so difficult to follow. In fact, it was frighteningly easy to slip away from the world.

* * *

It was weeks before Dimitri is ready to leave the bed, and months before he is well enough for ceremony. But as soon as he was, the boy from Duscur - Dedue Molinaro he called himself - knelt before him in the throne room.

He knighted Dedue, with his uncle’s consent and only his handful of personal friends as witnesses, and assigned him as his personal guard. The latter part was not with the consent of his regent, but he was certain nobody would publicly object too much to it. The former was the only way that Rodrigue could think to save him from the hate being stirred up across Faerghus, and the latter Dimitri's own, personal insurance that he could keep his own eyes on the matter.

Anti-Duscur sentiment was ever on the rise, the people calling for their blood. With the King dead and his only heir gravely wounded… Discontent had been stirred and stirred and is now a boiling pot they cannot calm. Now, Dimitri could not be certain that merely being in the palace would keep Dedue safe, such as he was.

Over the course of his recovery, Dedue had been a silent pillar of support, a worshipper at the shrine of Dimitri's sickbed. He was uncertain as to how that came to be permitted, only that it was. Or, if not permitted, then tolerated. He could not yet call the two of them close, but mayhaps a mutual understanding had been gained.

One day, Dimitri resolved, would make him his friend for real; for now, while they both adjusted to what the world had become, seeing him safe would have to do, but one day. And, until then, Dimitri would ensure that they would be a one day in which to achieve it.

Nobody makes friends with the dead, after all.

Dimitri could prove the truth of that statement for himself.


End file.
